OTTAWA — It cost the federal government more than $655,000 to respond to just nine days’ worth of calls from people worried about a data breach at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada that exposed confidential information on almost 600,000 Canada Student Loan recipients.

The department spent $586,659 — about $1 for every person affected by the data breach — for a dedicated private call-centre company to field calls from concerned Canadians in the first nine days that a toll-free number was set up. On top of that, the department spent about $69,000 to have a government-run call centre also take inquiries.

Postmedia News obtained the figures under the access to information law. The costs are calculated from Jan. 14 to Jan. 23 — the date the news service’s request reached the department — and the number provide some insight into the financial cost for the government as it continues to respond to the large loss of data.

By Jan. 23, there had been about 100,000 calls on the toll-free line. Since then, the number of calls has doubled.

The department did not respond to multiple requests on Friday for updated costs.

The toll-free number was set up in the wake of a Jan. 11 public announcement that an HRSDC employee had noticed a portable, external hard drive missing from national headquarters on Nov. 5, 2012. The drive contained the personal information of 583,000 loan recipients, including their addresses and social insurance numbers, along with personal information on 250 department employees.

The last time the drive was seen was in late August, 2012.

The call centres began accepting queries on Jan. 14. Callers were asked to provide their social insurance number over the phone and were then told whether their information was indeed on the missing drive.

One month after the call centres went live, about 200,000 people had dialled the toll-free number. On Feb. 14, department officials told a Commons committee that originally, about half of the calls ended up being from affected Canadians. That percentage increased to 65 per cent after late January when notifications letters went out to those specifically affected.

The call centres themselves have been the subject of complaints from callers, many of whom told Postmedia News that the people who answered were unable to provide more details about what had happened to their information and instead read from what sounded like a script.

The call centres were in three locations — two in Ottawa and one in Mississauga, just outside of Toronto. The Mississauga and one Ottawa call centre were operated by D+H Limited Partnership, a Toronto-based company that provides IT solutions for the financial industry, including student loan registration and recovery, according to its annual report.